iFall - My Progression...

I don't suppose you remember me or haven't ever seen me here before but I used to be a frequent poster here about a year or more ago and I released two game, Trouball and iFall with GameSalad. I never really found any success with either of them, with only a couple of sales a day until a few months ago they stopped all together.

A little more about me: Im 17 years old, from England, loved Macs since my first old beige power mac at the age of about 5. Im an avid gamer and sit at my computer all day everyday, hehe. As you have probably assumed, Im ever so sociable.

Anyway I have come back to tell you how I have progressed...

Back when GameSalad became available to the public I jumped on board and started making games. Being only 17 (15-16 at the time) years of age I have wanted to become a game developer since I began my GCSEs at about that age. GameSalad was a god sent for me and I managed to quickly pick up game creation after previously failing at dipping into programming in Objective-C.

After some months of use I released both Trouball and iFall with GameSalad onto the iTunes AppStore. I was over the moon, despite not being so high on sales at any point at all.

But the frequent use of GameSalad and learning all its abilities and rules really helped me understand the logical side to constructing apps and games in programming. While a fairly in direct method of learning to program it did an excellent job of grounding me and soon after I drifted out of the GameSalad community and began to program in Objective-C using Xcode.

After many, many months of painfully hard thinking and picking at tutorials all over the place I would like to think now, today, I have a good basic knowledge of Objective-C and will certainly help drive me into what I want to do. Im currently in year 13, doing my last year of A Levels, and hoping to get into a Computer Science course at university next year.

Anyway, below is a screenshot of my original GameSalad version of iFall:

My new version which is currently waiting for review and should be in the AppStore sometime next week:

In my new version, built in Xcode I have online leader board and achievement support with OpenFeint and Game Center, retina graphics, professional artwork (courtesy of my excellent artist, of course), massively improved performance, and a host of other features.

By no means am I saying GameSalad couldn't achieve this, but instead I am complimenting and thanking GameSalad and the community form when I was around (TShirtBooth and Quantum Sheep, special thanks) for giving me such a big step in the right direction, as I wouldn't be where I am now if it wasn't for GameSalad. Its proved to be a bigger stepping stone into a possible career than I ever imagined.

Congratulations and send me a message on Twitter (@zinapse) as I have a plan to start paying games developers to develop iOS games for my company at some point (at the moment I am doing everything myself using GameSalad so I can get a feel for what can be done).